A variety of different types of voting equipment are used in the United States and throughout the world. In many jurisdictions, a voter receives a paper ballot on which is printed the various contests to be voted on. The voter votes by darkening or otherwise marking the appropriate voting selection spaces on the paper ballot. The marked paper ballot may then be dropped in a ballot box, whereby the paper ballots accumulated in the ballot box are transferred to a central election office for tabulation. At the central election office, a central ballot counter is used to scan and tabulate the voting selections marked on paper ballots received from various polling locations.
In some instances, the central ballot counter is unable to read ballots that include improper markings. These ballots must be diverted from properly read ballots and adjudicated by a human election official. The election official must then manually recreate the ballot. Even when using electronic voting systems to recreate improperly marked ballots, the election official must enter every selection from the paper ballot into the electronic voting system. The manual recreation of ballots and manual entry of every selection is time-consuming and prone to human error in marking or entering selections for contests that were properly marked on the paper ballot.